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the complete review - drama

Youth Is a Sickness

by
Ferdinand Bruckner

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : arguably overheated, but quite effective

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "For anyone who thinks that today’s students are badly behaved, Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth should prove an eye-opener. Bruckner’s play depicts a group of wealthy students in 1920s Vienna, who bed-hop, pop pills, drink excessively and generally rebel against bourgeois society. " - Sarah Hemming, Financial Times
  
  
• "Man kann Bruckners Stück nur spielen, wenn man diese Alternativsetzung ernst nimmt. Wenn man wirklich Angst hat vor dem Verbürgerlichen, dem Altwerden und nicht meint, es handele sich dabei um einen harmlosen Scherz. Nur wenn man die Differenz zwischen Jugend und Erwachsensein ins Zentrum stellt, erhält der Nihilismus des Stücks eine Bedeutung über Zeiten und Orte hinweg." - Simon Strauss, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "The succcess of Mitchell's revival, however, lies in taking a potentially overheated play and treating it as a forensic analysis of a doomed, death-haunted generation." - Michael Billington, The Guardian
  
  
• "The students are morbidly conscious of all their impulses, right down to the sub-volitional. A certain kind of reviewer may complain that they don't connect what's going on in their turbulent insides to the body politic enough (if at all). But the analogy would be with Doctor Faustus. Marlowe didn't need to mention the plague, a crucial context in a play about a diabolically purchased 24-year lease of life because the plague was literally in the very air the audience breathed. Mutatis mutandis, this goes for political crisis and Pains of Youth." - Paul Taylor, The Independent
  
  
• "There’s a lot that’s striking in Bruckner’s script, starting with the fact that the story’s three medical students are women. (...) And sexual relations, treated frankly, have a curdled unhealthiness that is nicely of the time and place." - Rachel Saltz, The New York Times
  
  
• "Bruckner's characters, however, though very active when it comes to their sex lives, are as depressive and depressing a bunch as you are ever likely to encounter. (...) Rarely can sex have been as unsexy as it is here. Every relationship is mired in a toxic mixture of power games and despair. (...) I can see that the play is historically significant in both its sexual frankness and portrayal of the pessimism and soul-sickness that enveloped much of Europe after the First World War, allowing Nazism to flourish. But that doesn't make watching it any more bearable. The characters are flatly drawn, and though the truly great miserabilist masterpieces -- King Lear, say, or Beckett's Endgame -- leave the audience purged and braced, this narcissistic, self-pitying bunch merely leave you feeling irritated." - Charles Spencer, The Telegraph
  
  
• "(I)n the wrong hands it can seem like a melodramatic period piece steeped in Veronal and hysteria. But in Martin Crimp’s crisp, raw version as directed by Katie Mitchell, it becomes sharp-edged and eloquent, a forensic anatomy of a death-haunted generation that is at once emotional and cerebral." - Maria Margaronis, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Youth Is a Sickness is set in a student boardinghouse, and the character-list explains: "The girls are all very young, the men somewhat older". They are adults, however: the youngest character is the maid, Lucy, who is eighteen, while the three other women -- Marie, Desiree, and Irene -- are in their twenties, and at various stages in their medical studies, with Marie getting ready to celebrate her graduation. They are all academically successful, and driven. Irene is devoted to science and competitive, two semesters behind Desiree but planning on catching up with her ("we'll see who'll be the first to finish her thesis"). Meanwhile, Desiree is cramming for her next exam when the play opens -- and in complete command of the material.
       Their backgrounds are different: Desiree comes from an aristocratic family but ran away from her privileged home when she was seventeen. Irene comes from humble circumstances and has reïnvented herself -- complete with name-change (her actual name is Irma). Marie, meanwhile, is an "ambitious farm girl from Passau" -- coïncidentally the same town Lucy is from --, who comfortably takes charge (not that that's always appreciated: "Don't play schoolma'rm," Irene complains at one point, for example); even Freder acknowledges about Marie: "you are the very cliché of a young woman with full potential" -- though he doesn't mean it as a compliment.
       The somewhat older men are also considerably more idle: perpetual student Freder is on the same track but far behind Marie ("You've managed to do in ten semesters what it took me twenty-five to do"), Petrell a would-be writer -- with an emphasis on would-be ("Poet ? I don't know that I'm a poet", he admits, and for all his ambition -- "I'd like to write a great novel" -- isn't able to get down to it), and Alt's medical career was upended by his idealism, leading to a two year prison sentence for manslaughter.
       Marie has supported Petrell for the past two years, but Irene is now reaching out for him, while Desiree longs for an affection she hasn't found since childhood, with her sister, and clings ever more to Marie. Manipulative Freder has Lucy steal for him, and then even begin to walk the streets -- in which she surprisingly finds a fulfillment she'd long been missing -- and claims he could even get Marie to do the same.
       Desiree is the most tortured -- tempted, eventually, even to join Lucy walking the streets. Alt observes:

She's known for a long time that everything always ends in disappointment.

ALT: Everything's bottled up in you. Let things out.
MARIE: Show me the instruction manual.
ALT: All you need is to be casual. Be crueler to people, forget yourself, and you'll find yourself again.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 September 2018

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Links:

• Northwestern University Press publicity page
• textbuehne.eu publicity page
• Faber publicity page
• Weidler Verlag publicity page
• éditions Théâtrales publicity page
• Asociación de Directores de Escena de España publicity page

• the arts desk*
• The Austin Chronicle*
• Chicago Critic*
• Chicago Reader*
• CurtainUp*
• Evening Standard*
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian*
• The Independent*
• Das Kulturblog (German)
• Medical Humanities*
• nachtkritik.de (German) (1)
• nachtkritik.de (German) (2)
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• Postcards from the Gods*
• Social Affairs Unit*
• Stage Door*
• Der Standard (German)
• Sydney Morning Herald*
• Anja Suša*
• The Telegraph*
• Télérama (French)
• Theatre is Easy*

• Criminals

• See Index of Drama books
• See Index of German literature
• See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

       Austrian playwright Ferdinand Bruckner (actually: Theodor Tagger) lived 1891 to 1958.

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© 2018 the complete review

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